This is a pen called “D:Scribe”, a design by Reuben Png and was featured on the Yanko Designs blog:

I personally prefer to write with pen and paper. However, I end up eventually transferring it to the computer for all the goodness of digital material (rewritable, linkable, searchable, backup-able, etc.) With this pen, you can have the best of both worlds… and it looks awesome!

I so wish I could get this right now.

Or one of these high tech napkins designed by Avery Holleman:

Just scribble on these foldable plastic napkins and it’ll automatically be synced with the computer. Imagine kids drawing together separately but the picture being simultaneously updated in each of their napkins. Oh, and they don’t need batteries.

I was impressed with the “Window to the World” designed by Mac Funamizu:

Imagine being able to point at anything - whether it is a building, a book or a person, and immediately getting back information on what it is or store details about it. Perfect when you’re lost in a new city or you’re simply reading a book and want to understand new words or historical names without being forced to flip through a dictionary or visit Wikipedia on a traditional computer and browser.

When I’m at this, I’m lusting over the Nokia Morph. If you haven’t seen it already, you must check out their concept video (showcasing the amount of thought they’ve put into this already):

It’s truly amazing what the human mind can imagine. And what we can do with technology.

Update: And amazingly close to what I was wishing for is Pranav Mistry’s Quickies project at the MIT Media Lab (via Nirav).

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty, I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. – R. Buckminster Fuller

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:

“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”

Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ’system’.

There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:

Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.

“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.

More examples are:

• Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next - this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
• Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
• Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
• MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
• Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
• Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
• Wesabe for personal finance.
• CrowdSpirit for electronics.
• Threadless for T-shirts.
• Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
• Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
• We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
• And many many more.

Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).

The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.

The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!

But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?

The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:

I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.

The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.

Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.

I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:

Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.

…

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?

Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.

Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.

Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?

Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.

       Depth of friendship ∝ Time spent willingly × Sharing

My observation is that nothing else matters as much as these two factors.

P.S. I got the idea of sharing being a major factor from Srikanth Thunga (whose blog doesn’t seem to be alive any more).

I gleaned this from a random look at the website logs for two weeks.

P.S. What does he/she mean by using orkut effectively? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

On Day 14 of my Singapore trip (Jan 04, 2008), it was time to head back home. It was a mixed bag for me. On one hand, I felt so liberated experiencing a vacation which seemed overdue. On the other hand, I was rearing to get back to my realities (well, not really, but I didn’t want to delude myself any further).

This trip was interesting from many perspectives. For one, I had simply no agenda. I landed in a new country with 13 days and no plan whatsoever. I started off by reading some magazine cutouts on the plane. Later, I figured out that the info was all online.

I ended up going up in a hot air balloon to take in the awesome sight of a lit-up Singapore at night, seeing more than a thousand toys at a toys museum, cycling in an island, sleeping in a library, deep in philosophical conversations by the beach, trekking alone for 20 km in a water reservoir area, watching a 12-year old kid strum ‘Hotel California’, have my roots shaken, admire ancient societies, saw an Indian National Army monument, visited the world’s largest fountain, had mouth-watering Indian food at Bombay Express Cafe, grooved to Felix Da Housecat’s mixing skills at the Zouk Club, prayed at the Krishna Temple on the first day of the new year, saw animals like mousedeer, bat-eared fox, sugar glider and east african bongos at the Night Safari, saw remote-controlled kites being flown, and so on.

There were two big things for me in this trip.

One was spending time with my friends Abishek Nair and Ashish Dantu. Thanks a ton guys for being such great hosts, for the conversations, for making me watch Russell Peters at 2 am, for all the fun we had, and for teaching me so many things without ever having to say anything.

The second thing was coming away inspired. Inspired by the pulse of the city, inspired by their belief that “it’s possible.” ‘It’ just needs a vision, a decision and a team to execute. On the other hand, I’m terrified that people are progressing so fast and working towards their dreams and I’m getting left behind.

I had a lot of time to think, inside out. Putting life into perspective. As Einstein once said “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” So, it’s good to step back once in a while and think about the big picture of your life. The challenge is to avoid getting lost again in the daily grind, which is so hard.

In fact, it’s interesting how many people actually go through these step-back-and-breathe phases, it’s just that it is completely hush-hush, and understandably so, it’s a very personal thing.

On the other hand, there’s so much happening out there from things like man-made islands to the King Abdullah Economic City, an entire city being built on the sea!

This trip made me see how the world is changing and how I should change, rather than me just being a ‘frog in the well’ and not knowing what’s really going on ‘out there’.

Travelling is a necessity for me, not a luxury. It’s my way of overcoming implosion. Our ancestors understood this. As an old Kannada saying goes: “desha noDu, kosha vodu” (roughly translates to “Travel the world, Read books”).

I have this notion that you don’t get to really know a city until you’ve run in it.

So, I ran a couple of times in my Singapore trip, and I liked the route so much that on Day 13 (Thu, Jan 03, 2008), I started taking photos.

I start right from getting out of Abishek and Ashish’s apartment and getting down the stairs.

This is a proper urban area, not outside the city. Don’t be fooled by the greenery.

Was listening to “Heartbeat - Instrumental” from ‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’.

Was listening to “Far Away” by Nickelback.

I love the wide open spaces they have kept for public usage right in the middle of a square area with huge apartments on all sides.

Was listening to “Ninnindale” from Milana (Kannada movie).

It was good to see so many runners around. The best part is that people accept it as normal behavior. And cyclists are given their due respect.

The most startling thing was when I was waiting to cross the road, the vehicles will stop (irrespective of traffic) and ask you to go ahead first. It was actually irritating at first to experience this, but soon got used to it.

Was listening to “Endings” by Dusty Hughes.

Was listening to “One Thing” by Finger Eleven.

What more can a running enthusiast like me ask for?

P.S. If you’re curious on why people run, watch the trailer of the Marathon Movie.